Karr did not press the point: clever men are rare, and, as he did not wish Bohain to hang himself, he sent him prose instead. This was a great humiliation for the young poet to have to swallow. All the articles of a pastoral nature that were published by _le Figaro_ at this period were by Alphonse Karr. Karr had made himself the oddest of dwelling-places. He had hired the old Tivoli at Montmartre, which had half tumbled in ruins into the quarries: there still remained a little wood and the cloakroom made of rushes. By night he slept in the cloakroom; by day he walked in the little wood. Here he began his first novel, _Sous les tilleuls._ He finished it in the rue de la Ferme-des-Mathurins, in the workshop of the two brothers Johannot, which he took after them. From Montmartre, Alphonse Karr only came into Paris about twice a month. He had a boat at Saint-Ouen, where he spent all the time he had left from his wood or the cloakroom. _Sous les tilleuls_ appeared in 1831, I believe. The book, worthy of notice, was accordingly noticed. That means it was attacked bitterly, as all things that show originality and power are attacked in France. They first accused the author of imitating a book of Nodier's that had appeared a fortnight after his; unfortunately, the date being on the title page, they had to withdraw that accusation. They next accused him of having translated it wholesale from the German, and even went so far as to give the title of the German original, _Unter den Linden_ (Under the Limes), but it was soon seen that there was no book bearing such a title throughout the whole range of German literature, and that in nearly all the large towns was to be found a public promenade called thus--a fact Alphonse Karr did not deny. The author had placed as epigrams at the head of his chapters or letters verses of his own, no doubt those that Bohain had rejected, but which he had felt it his duty to adorn with the names of Schiller, Goethe and Uhland. The critics were taken in, and praised them at the expense of the prose. Prose and verse were both Karr's! Besides, a large number of the letters in the novel had been actually written to a young girl of whom Karr had been deeply enamoured. Karr did not receive his decoration until 1845 or 1846. One day he was told by Cavé that it was a question of giving the Cross to his father or himself. Marie-Louise had promised the Cross to his father, who, in 1840, was still waiting for it. Karr sought out M. Duchâtel, and, having satisfied himself that Cavé was quite correct in his statement, he said to the minister-- "Monsieur, when a father and son are both deserving of the Cross, the son does not accept it before his father." And M. Duchâtel only gave the decoration to the father, whereas both father and son ought to have had it. When his father died, Karr received a decoration; he took the last ribbon his father had worn from his coat and put it on his own.